• Publisher: Beletrina
• 448 pages
• Author: Gabriela Babnik
• Original title: Tišina polna vetra

Jeanne Duval and Charles Baudelaire first met in 1842. Their relationship lasted some twenty years, during which time the poet wrote a number of the most famous poems in Les Fleurs du Mal. James MacManus, in his book Black Venus, notes that nearly all of Baudelaire’s biographers have con- demned Duval as the person who ruined the great poet’s life. Among other things, she is accused of cheating on him with his friends, squandering his money, and supplying him with opium. Gabriela Babnik’s novel A Silence Full of the Wind, however, is no mere repetition of established biography. While we do, certainly, find here scenes from a passionate relationship, the February Revolution of 1848, and Jeanne Duval’s testimony

at court, the archaic origins of racism and anti-Blackness are also carefully reflected in the novel. No longer does Du- val represent some hallucinatory sexual force; no longer is she a Creole (probably from Haiti), the bastard daughter of a Black female slave and a white plantation owner; rather, the novel deconstructs the poet’s relationship to the muse. The Black female, one of the most fertile sources of poetic creativity, is no longer a now indifferent, now ready-for- anything, now submissive woman who inspires the phan- tasmagorical impulses of the French male, but what we see instead in this novel is a genuine encounter between two characters. Their relationship, which undergoes an inter-

4 esting twist at the end, is presented as a kind of power play.

The novel explores the history of the period, the influence of photography on the depiction of the female nude, hot-air ballooning, Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, the status of the poet in an urban environment, the history of silence, the aesthetic of the colonial imagination, and, especially, the gender and class differences between Charles Baude- laire and Jeanne Duval.

About the author

Gabriela Babnik

Gabriela Babnik (1979) is a writer, literary critic and translator, who lives between Ljubljana and Oua- gadougou in Burkina Faso. Her book reviews and articles on liter- ary works appear regularly in the Slovene periodical press. Her first novel, Cotton Skin (Koža iz bom- baža, 2007), received the Best Debut Award of the Slovenian Book Fair.

This was followed by the novels In the Tall Grass (V visoki travi, 2009), Dry Season (Sušna doba, 2012), In- timately (Intimno, 2015), and Three Deaths (Tri smrti, 2019), with three of these titles garnering nomina- tions for the Kresnik Award for best Slovenian novel of the year. In 2013, she was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature for Dry Season, which has been translated into more than ten languages, and that same year she also received the Stritar Prize for her literary criti- cism. Babnik has translated several literary works by African authors and also writes radio plays.